Renewed push for US deal

By SIMON COLLINS

Government ministers will next week consider a process for seeking a free-trade agreement with the United States.

Trade Negotiations Minister Jim Sutton said yesterday that talks with United States officials during the World Trade Organisation meeting in Qatar last week were "very encouraging".

"The ball is now in our court ... I will be reporting back to my colleagues next week," he said.

The Qatar talks followed discussions at the Apec summit in Shanghai last month between Prime Minister Helen Clark and US President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Helen Clark has agreed to open a high-powered conference on the proposed agreement in Auckland on December 6.

The guests will include Opposition Leader Bill English, US Ambassador Charles Swindells and a galaxy of business leaders.

A conference organiser, Dr Anatole Bogatski of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce, said the chairman and chief executive of the US Chamber of Commerce both gave their "total support" to a trade deal with New Zealand when they met Helen Clark in Shanghai.

"A free-trade agreement with the United States, or a closer economic agreement as we prefer to call it, is going to be bigger possibly even than CER [closer economic relations with Australia] in the sort of efficiencies it will force into NZ business and the sort of opportunities it will provide for NZ business," Dr Bogatski said.

However, New Zealand is only one of a queue of countries seeking trade deals with the US if Congress gives President Bush "trade promotion authority".

Mr Sutton said he was in "more or less regular contact" with US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick.

"Our embassy has been active in Washington, we have good support on the Hill [Congress], good support in the business community in the US," he said.

New Zealand had been obliged to raise the issue because Australia had made a strong pre-election bid for a deal with the US.



"Had Australia made progress and we didn't, it would distort investment flows."

Mr Sutton told the NZ-Korea Business Council in Auckland yesterday that New Zealand remained interested in a free-trade deal with South Korea. In that case, the ball was in Korea's court.

He saw the deal reached with Singapore last year, and one now being negotiated with Hong Kong, as strategic agreements aimed at giving NZ exporters a toehold in Asia.

"The next serious free-trade agreement negotiations we get into will be with whichever of our more important trading partners is interested in making rapid progress," Mr Sutton said.

"We have one with Australia, our biggest trading partner. After that, it's in the order of the size of our trade: the US, Japan, the European Union, Korea.

New Zealand's relationship with the US had been warming up over the past year or two.

Although a deal with the US looked an unlikely prospect at face value - because even the North American Free Trade Agreement did not cover agriculture - the US Administration "could do worse than New Zealand" if it was interested in a deal with an agricultural exporting nation.

* The NZ-US Closer Economic Partnership conference is co-sponsored by the Herald.